and blood at his feet. A Marine ran toward him with a devastating report: “Staff Sergeant, I found him and it’s just his torso.” Steve approached and said a prayer to God for the deceased. “I walked another one hundred meters down the road and found his leg and more pieces. We scraped up his remains and put his body parts in the back of the truck. He was my buddy.”
Raising his lowered eyes from the flickering fire, Steve stared outward before picking up the thread. “The next morning my truck got blown to shit by an IED,” he said. “After we opened fire and chased down the insurgents, we went to the hospital. I had traumatic brain injury and my hearing was severely damaged. I never felt normal again.”
He asked himself, “How can you walk up to your friend and find him like that and not have it profoundly impact you for the rest of your life? How could you come back from that?” With his blue eyes shaded by a brimmed camouflage hat, his boyish face revealed the answer: you don’t. Like World War II veteran Earl Shaffer had before him, Steve was walking off his war as he hiked the length of the Appalachian Trail, to rid the demons from his head, to heal from his PTSD. This was a different kind of mission.
NEXT TO STEVE THAT EVENING AROUND THE CAMPFIRE SAT HIS WIFE, RUBY Clendenning, a striking long-haired woman of Mexican descent. Her arm embraced her husband’s shoulders. A Marine herself, Ruby also suffered from PTSD, a result of sexual assault in the military. Although the cause of the trauma was different, Ruby understood her husband’s pain.
“Back then, I could not go into public places,” Steve said. “I was on too many medications and behaved like a zombie. I was in a complete funk, would not shower, or eat.” On the one-year anniversary of the exploding-IED injury and losing his friend, Steve tried to take his own life. “I got drunk out of my mind. I moved the car out of the garage, opened up the ladder to the attic door, and fashioned an extension cord into a noose which I hung from the rafters.” He doesn’t know how he did it—he had never tied a noose before. He stood on the ladder with his phone in his hand, texting everyone he loved. “I could not stand the images in my brain anymore, or the nightmares, and I wanted them to go away.” At the exact right moment, Ruby walked into the garage and found Steve. She had woken in the middle of the night, rolled over in bed, and noticed he was gone. She had searched the house for him, fortunately finding him in time..
Steve was put into a psychiatrist’s care. He spent four years at the Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Battalion located at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. After retiring from the military, he’s been going to doctors, attending weekly counseling, and having brain scans. He gained weight and had a hard time finding peace. Then he learned about the Appalachian Trail, Earl Shaffer’s therapeutic hike in 1948, and the path’s potential for healing trauma. He loaded up a backpack and headed for the southern end of the AT in Georgia.
STEVE SET OUT WITH A GROUP OF HIKERS AND, AS THE DAYS AND MILES ticked by, the journey indeed brought him a sense of peace. The hike was not without major challenges, however. There was a norovirus outbreak in Virginia, and along the trail Steve became so sick that he was hospitalized and had to have his appendix removed. After a five-day hospital stay and another eight days of recovery at home, Steve resumed his hike. During those two weeks off the trail to recuperate, he began to fall apart mentally and felt his PTSD returning in full force. “All I had to do was open up the oven door when the stove was on, and I was right back in Iraq,” Steve remembered. “That oppressive heat flooding out reminded me of exiting the air-conditioned Humvee and the Iraqi heat slamming me.” His response to the open oven door is an example of what is known as “body memory,” when a sensory experience triggers a traumatic memory.
Steve missed his fellow hikers, the trail, and the peace that the journey had brought him. Off-trail, his nightmares returned as well as his anger. One time when Steve and Ruby were shopping at the local Walmart for trail food and supplies, his rage got the best of him. In the first-aid aisle, a teenager in a hoodie zoomed by in a motorized wheelchair, almost clipping Steve and Ruby. Steve stopped him and said, “What are you doing? Those are for people who need them.”
The boy said he’d hurt his ankle and sped away. A minute later, a girl flew by. “Get off that and leave it right here,” Steve called after the kid, but she ignored him. Then Steve saw the pair walking in the next aisle. Incensed, he yelled, “Hey! You’re walking just fine now. Your ankle must not be hurt anymore.”
“Uh, yeah, it feels a little better,” the teenager said. But Steve was not having it. “You’re full of shit,” he said. It was the girl’s response that really escalated things for Steve. “Oh you must be real badass that you’re picking on little kids,” she said.
“He don’t look like no little kid to me,” said Steve, as he moved a little closer.
Ruby anticipated trouble and ran off to get the manager. When he arrived on the scene, Steve let him have it. “You’d better get these kids out of here, or I’m gonna put blood all over the front of your building. You don’t know who you’re dealing with here! You have no idea what shit I have been through!” The manager promptly escorted the kids out of the store, but in a few minutes the boy returned and took a photo of Steve with his cell phone. Steve threw everything he was holding onto the floor and went after the boy. Ruby tried to grab him and hold him back, but couldn’t. The manager chased Steve outside.
In the parking lot, Steve finally calmed down. “It could have been real bad,” Ruby said. “If Steve would have put his hands on those kids, he would have gotten himself in trouble. When something trips his temper, he can’t control it.”
Steve explained his behavior this way: “Anger is what comes out when all the other emotions from the war build up. It’s survivor’s guilt. Why am I here and why didn’t those other guys make it?” Anger is sadness coming out sideways. Explosive anger is a reaction cultivated in the military to survive in combat. But this approach doesn’t work in normal society.
STEVE DID NOT WANT TO BE ANGRY ANYMORE, AND HE FOUND THAT ECOTHERAPY provided a path to letting go. As clinical psychologist Lynne Williams explains: “Being in nature, whether a walk in a leafy park, a paddle on a lake, or a longer hiking trip, all help shift the brain to the relaxed, calm, focused electrical brainwave pattern. Our brains run on electricity, with various wave patterns being involved in various experiences and activities. Learning to switch to the relaxed alpha pattern (through nature, creativity, interacting with pets, water sounds, classical music, to name some activities) helps rewire the emotionally dysregulated PTSD brain into a calmer, focused one capable of new learning and new experiences.”
Ruby encouraged Steve’s hiking the Appalachian Trail. She told him he should not quit regardless of how many times he was in the hospital, sick, or injured. He had to go back and finish what he started, although his absence was hard on Ruby. “It’s a sacrifice for us left behind too. I’m not home making fuckin’ cupcakes.” She worked full-time as a Marine at Camp Lejeune’s Department of Defense while also running the household and emotionally supporting her husband on the trail (they spoke frequently by phone). She visited Steve twice on the trail as he traveled northward. Every time she saw him, she initially thought: I have my old Steve back. “But then he would say or do something, and I’d know he wasn’t a hundred percent.”
Ruby didn’t question the sacrifice. “Steve is my best friend. I don’t ever question the money he spent or the time he has been away. I can’t put a dollar price on getting my husband back. I just want the Steve back that I married. And if I can’t, I want him as good as I can get.” A few months later, with a thousand more miles on the soles of his boots, Steve reached Mount Katahdin in Maine, the end of the Appalachian Trail. The long journey had provided indeed, helping Steve walk his way out of anger, toward a place of peace.
I was a big tough Marine a few years back. I killed
